Claims that Saturday’s Afghan election saw relatively little violence have turned out to be false, according to new data released by the international forces occupying that nation, which showed that the violence had actually risen considerably over last year’s presidential vote.

Previous claims by the international forces claimed that violence was down over the previous vote, but they decided to release their data after an Afghan NGO released data that showed a 56% increase in attacks over the 2009 vote, and a 15-fold increase in overall violence over last September.

Yet while the ISAF data did not agree with the NGO’s numbers exactly, they did point in precisely the same direction, showing an increase of about 35% over the previous vote. Officials continued to maintain that the violence was much less “high profile” but this seems to be a claim of more successful media management, not security.

Between the violence and the almost ridiculous levels of fraud in the vote, the turnout was embarrassingly low. Yet interestingly enough the turnout levels, as with the violence levels, were falsely reported to the media initially, suggesting that the efforts to portray the vote as a success were flat out falsehoods, and deliberate attempts to mislead the public.

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